Imagined
by swim freak 9000
Summary: Because every love story, real or imagined, deserves to be told. A kind of trailer for my longer fic, coming soon to a fansite near you. Norm/Trudy


**A/N: Avatar blew my mind. Twice. It was amazing and beautiful and fascinating, and I fell in love with the idea of a Norm/Trudy relationship (and face it, there aren't nearly enough stories about them). However, the full length fic I'm working on is currently 38 pages and probably needs a good ten more, but I'm itching to post something about Avatar. Hence this little "teaser trailer" for my longer story (which should be here…maybe in a week? Maybe two? Depends on the homework load). **

**These are basically random bits and pieces of what I've written so far. Not guaranteed to stay in the story, but hopefully they'll pique your interest. Also, if anyone particularly loves or hates any of this, please let me know, as the long version of the story can easily be adjusted at this time. **

**So, without further ado…**

* * *

Trudy smiled. "So you just got here today?" she asked.

Norm nodded. "Yep. Fresh off the home planet."

"What do you think so far?"

He shrugged. "I haven't been here long enough to form much of an opinion," he lied.

She chuckled. "Kid, I know the look – bright eyed and bushy tailed. This has been the best day of your life, hasn't it?" Norm paused, and then nodded again, smiling in return. "So tell me about it," Trudy prompted.

* * *

"Hey, Jake?" asked Norm suddenly, looking up.

"Yeah?"

"What do you think of Trudy Chacon?"

Jake paused, then smirked. "I think you're biting off more than you can chew."

"You're one to talk."

"Hey, at least the worst Neytiri can do is kill the blue mind controlled me." Norm decided not to ask what the worst Trudy could do was. Jake raised his water bottle. "To women," he offered. "Can't live without them, and we definitely can't live with them."

"I'll drink to that." Norm tapped his bottle against Jake's.

"To what?" asked Grace, entering the room, looking exhausted and a little worse for wear. Her hair was disheveled, her clothes looked as though they had been put on backwards, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

"Why, to you, gorgeous," replied Jake in a teasing voice. Grace smacked him on the head as she walked by.

* * *

"This is amazing."

"Sure is," said Trudy. "Feel like you're breathing for the first time in your life?" He nodded. "Yeah, me too," she replied.

Norm paused for a minute, and then leaned forward, placing a kiss on Trudy's cheek. He pulled away, uncertain, to gage her reaction. For a moment her expression was unfathomable as she stared straight ahead into nothing. Then she lifted her gaze to meet his, and leaned closer. "You missed," she said quietly.

"What?"

"You missed," she repeated, and she pressed her lips to his.

* * *

Norm's eyes widened. His heart pounded unevenly in his chest, his hands were suddenly clammy. He took a step back and sunk down in the chair behind him. "Oh." He ran his tongue over his dry lips. "Oh."

The average human IQ is 100. Norm Spellman's happened to be 156 – Einstein territory. His brain was home to approximately 6,490,000,000,000 brain cells. He had always been top of his class, top of his field. He was published several times in renowned scientific journals, and had been studying hard almost since the day he was born. He was a member of the group of humanity's most intelligent individuals. He was basically paid to think.

Throw a girl into the equation and his ability to do so flies out the window. Throw a _baby_ in the mix and his ability to form a coherent though doesn't just vanish, it reverses itself. His brain now actively works to confuse itself.

* * *

"Doctor Norm Spellman here," he said. "Grace and Jake are both driving their avatars, but Grace wanted us to log every single day, so…" he trailed off and cleared his throat, glancing down at his notes. "The new plant we've been studying, _patz'un_, has turned out to be a bit more dangerous than we realize. Grace's avatar was almost killed the other day, only Mo'at's antidote saved her at the last minute. Grace has put off studying it further until the ingredients for more of the antidote have been properly dried and mixed, so we've been focusing more on the signal transduction of the tree roots. It seems as though the trees are able to send electro-chemical pulses out to the surrounding trees, and through this they are…" Norm trailed off again. He sighed, looking down on his notes. "Science," he muttered to himself. "It's so…uncomplicated." He looked up at the camera.

"Truth is, I feel like I know less than when I came here. It's not the forest that's confusing me, it's the people I'm with. Everything's different now. Everything's backwards. The science comes easily, and everything else is mysterious and impossible.

* * *

"I don't know. I came here expecting to lose myself in the forest. I lost myself in something else."

* * *

They say that saying things out loud has no impact on reality. After all, people lie. Sometimes life lies right back. But for Norm Spellman, hearing the words come out of his own mouth changed things. It was evaporated hydrochloric acid meets ammonia gas – suddenly things solidified. What was once transparent becomes visible. What was once half imagined becomes real.

* * *

"I ran away from home when I was sixteen. I lasted six weeks on my own before I turned around and came crawling back. I ran away from school, from military camp. Colonel was on my case for weeks after that one. I ran away from _earth_, Norm. How messed up is that?" Norm didn't reply. Trudy sighed.

"But I was thinking," she continued. "That maybe, just maybe, I should try to kick the habit. I mean, what good am I to myself – much less anyone else – if all I do is run? I mean, it's just…" She sighed, and looked up at him, meeting his green eyes for the first time in weeks. "I don't want to run away from the one really, really good thing I have here, you know?"

* * *

Trudy sighed, closing her eyes and tilting her head back. "I didn't mean-"

"I don't care what you meant!" Norm suddenly shouted, standing. "I thought we were on the same team here. I thought wrong."

"You don't know what they can do to me!" Trudy shouted back, standing to tower over Norm despite being a good foot shorter than him. "You're safe, Norm – don't you get that? You're a _scientist_." She spat out the word like it was a curse. "You report to tree huggers with test tubes! What's the worst they can do – ban you from the bio lab? My superiors can have me _killed_, Norm. There's a lot more at stake here than my pilot's license. I disobey Colonel's direct orders, and I lose _everything._" Her eyes were angry and pleading, harsh and fearful.

Norm glared at her. "Then maybe you deserve to lose everything."

* * *

Screw the impossible. It had no place butting into his life.

* * *

"You know," he said, looking at her over his shoulder. "You're one crazy bitch. And Quaritch is going to swallow you whole."

"I hope he chokes on me. Now get off my ship."

* * *

Of course, at the end of the day the heart cannot be reasoned into anything. It want what it wants, takes what it takes, gives what it gives. Breaks when it breaks. And as long as Norm Spellman's heart was beating, he was not going to be able to tell it what to do.

* * *

He wondered how the two feelings could coexist. He'd never believed that "fine line between love and loathing" crap – he'd thought there was a Great Wall of China between the two. But maybe both points of view were wrong – maybe there was no line at all.

* * *

Grace and Jake were violently forced back into the real world, kicking and screaming. "Murderers!" Grace was screeching. "Killers!" Jake was half dazed, too lost and broken to even speak. Norm shouted without knowing what he was shouting, until his hoarse voice couldn't take it anymore. He half collapsed on the floor, the burning planet on the screen still casting its hellish orange light into the room. Norm turned around slowly, just in time to see Selfridge turning his back on the chaos his three little words had created, walking with hunched shoulders back to his office to spin the tiny, million dollar rock that hovered above his desk.

* * *

"Same old, same old," the soldier replied. Trudy laughed. It was fake, hollow, and still the most welcome sound Norm had ever heard in his life.

* * *

Someone – probably Norm – was calling her name from outside. She stayed a moment longer, though, gripping the edges of the sink until her knuckles turned white. She looked herself in the eyes, and wondered if talking to herself made her crazy. Not caring, she opened her mouth anyway. "Well, this is it," she said. "We've had a good run of it, haven't we? I mean, sure, we were bitchy, heartless, and stupid, sometimes, but overall, it's been good, right? Or at least interesting?"

* * *

_Do not go gentle into that good night,_

_But rage, rage, against the dying of the light._

Rage. Yeah, she had a lot of that.

* * *

Trudy waited in silence for a moment, her fingers drumming on the control panel unevenly, her own heart beating rapidly as she ran her tongue over her lips and waited for the order to fly.

Jake's voice echoed over the transmitter about ten minutes later. "Trudy, you there?" Trudy could hardly hear him over the sounds of the chaos of battle.

"I'm here. You're ready for me, I assume."

"Yes. It's starting."

Trudy smiled to herself. "No, Jake. This is where it ends."

* * *

Norm Spellman was discovering there's something about death that makes you strangely poetic. Maybe everyone wants to go out thinking highly of themselves – telling themselves how brave they are, or how eloquent and wise they have become. Or maybe everyone is so terrified they can't even form an original thought, and have to go with the hardly comforting words of others.

* * *

Metal. Glass. Fire. Blood.

And then she was flying.

Now Trudy did shut her eyes. Her body was broken and bleeding, mangled and twisted up in itself. And yet her expression was serene.

She was going to die with the wind on her face.

* * *

**Well…yes. Hopefully I didn't give too much away, although I'm fairly certain I did. Whoops. **

**Please review! I really will answer your questions and take your comments into consideration as I finish the long version of this story. **


End file.
